History isn’t here yet. It’s coming, but maybe this time we can take it on our own terms.

The sentence above is pronounced by King-Lu to his friend Cookie, in one of the several memorable moments of this great and awfully overlooked film (specially at the Academy Awards), a huge artistic achievement by director Kelly Reichardt – one of the best films of 2020. The aforementioned duo of unlikely friends is composed of two poor-devils, globetrotters making their path as hard as they can in the dense heart of darkness of a semi-colonized America.

First Cow is a film filled with latencies. However, more uncomfortable to the individual than the predicament of becoming is the predicament of the eternal becoming: that which will never be finished at all in its definitive form, never fulfilled. Except death. Death is the only completeness that we can aspire to, after all. The friendship between King-Lu and Cookie enchants us with the potency that is revealed in it. Will these two melancholy outcasts be able to triumph in the world together?

Or will History deal with both on its own tragic terms, as usual, despite the efforts of the two young fellas? And what are those terms, by the way? The terms of The Treasure of The Sierra Madre (1948, John Huston)? No, not those. Kelly Reichardt still believes in the truth of being: affection and loyalty, here, are incorruptible, and it is this simplicity that (still) moves audiences. Fortunately. We (still) live in dark times, but it’s good to know that not every slice of our soul have been ripped off from us.

Yet History will not fail to run them over. With extreme prejudice. First Cow tells its tale not like an historiographic account of the shortcomings of America’s colonization. Kelly Reichardt drinks from the fountain of mythopoetic chronicles: primeval oral parables, epic and lyric at once, that help to constitute the subjectivity of individuals and nations. In all times, everywhere in the world, since us human beings conquered our greatest treasure – and kept it: consciousness.

First Cow, like any such narratives, runs on and transcends to a non-place, a mythical realm: the aforementioned heart of the darkness of semi-tamed America; in a non-time, a mythical era: the History that has yet to arrive there, as King-Lu so acutely states. Thus, the characters in parables are note easily and exclusively defined by social and historic categorizations: they are non-subjects. But here lies, dialectically, the modernity of the film, its firm and conscious insertion in a contemporary dialogue.

King-Lu and Cookie are non-individuals not because they heroically transcend the human condition, mortal condition; nor are they from aristocratic extracts of “superior” blood, like classic Greek epic heroes. They are not superhuman at all. Not even human. King-Lu and Cookie are subhuman, turned subhuman on their social condition, as they have absolutely no power over History, the vehicle on which parade those who conquered the Earth, trampling over those who had not and will have no voice or turn. Erased from History.

That’s the tragic aspect of their story. In ancient Greek theater, the tragic fate was a privilege of the nobility, favorite toy of the gods. In the modern New World of Kelly Reichardt, a disenchanted world abandoned by the deities, fate is not a cosmic force, but a vulgar economic, political; however, as ruthless as the old powers. The ancient Greeks also believed that immortality was guaranteed by the memory that the dead left among the living. Thus, the poor in the modern world only have death. Definitive.